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Abstract. Despite the popular representation of the masculine hero migrant (Ni Laoire, 2001), rural youth scholars have found that young men are more likely to stay on in their communities, while young women tend to be more mobile, leaving for education and better employment opportunities elsewhere (Corbett, 2007b; Lowe, 2015). Taking a spatialized approach (Farrugia, Smyth & Harrison, 2014), we contribute to and extend the rural youth studies scholarship on gender, mobilities and place by considering the case of young Newfoundlanders’ geo- graphical mobilities in relation to male-dominated resource extraction industries.

We draw on findings from two SSHRC-funded research projects, the Rural Youth and Recovery project, a subcomponent of the Community-University Research for Recovery Alliance (CURRA) and the Youth, Apprenticeship and Mobility project, a subcomponent of the On the Move Partnershi We argue that the spatial coding of gender relations in rural Newfoundland makes certain kinds of mobil- ities more intelligible and possible for young men, while constraining women’s.

In other words, gender relations of rural places are “stretched out” (Farrugia et al., 2014) across space through the mobility practices of young men and women in relation to work in skilled trades and resource extraction industries. These

“stretched out” gender relations are reproduced by the organisation of a sector that relies on a mobile workforce free from care and domestic work and familiar with manual work.

Keywords: Gender; Youth; Alberta; Newfoundland; Resource extraction; Fort

McMurray; Employment; Mobility; Mobile Workforce

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T he gendered nature of rural youth migration is well established both in Canada (Corbett, 2007a, b, c; Norman and Power, 2015; Ommer, 2007) and in other places (Kenway et al., 2006; Lowe, 2015; Ni Laoire, 2001, 2011), with rural young men being more likely to stay on in their communities, while young women are more likely to leave for educa- tion and to pursue different kinds of employment opportunities (Corbett 2007b, Cloke and Little, 1997, Lowe, 2015, Rye, 2006; Thissen et al., 2010). In this paper, we tell a somewhat different story of young people’s mobilities – one that focuses on how place-specific gender relations en- able the employment-related geographical mobilities (ERGMs) of rural young men in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. ERGM en- compasses a spectrum of mobility practices related to employment, and their spatial and temporal dimensions, that includes outmigration as well as long commutes to and from work, travelling to remote work locations for extended periods of time and so on (Newhook et al., 2011). Recent public and policy discussions on the (primarily economic) viability of rural communities in the province have focused on the interrelated im- pacts of young people’s ERGMs (e.g., youth outmigration, inter- and intra-provincial labour mobility), the aging demographic structure of the province’s population, and a trend toward rural depopulation and expanded urban growth (Simms and Greenwood, 2015). Power (2017) has argued that public and media discourse has attributed rural decline largely to young people’s outmigration and their poor decision-making in relation to education and training. This interpretation ignores the com- plexity and range of mobility practices among rural young people in the province. While outmigration and labour mobility are not new phenom- ena, a shift in the province’s economy from a reliance on wild fisheries to resource extraction in the oil and gas, construction and mining sec- tors is shaping current patterns of intra- and inter-provincial workforce mobility. As elsewhere, employment in resource extraction remains male-dominated, despite diversity initiatives aimed at attracting women to the industry. Focusing specifically on women’s and men’s employ- ment and related mobility practices that are differently positioned or orientated (Ahmed, 2006) in relation to resource extraction, we examine how place-specific gender relations shape the mobility experiences of young people at the same time that they are reproduced through mobility.

We argue that these gendered mobilities have inequitable consequences

for youth, where place-specific gender power relations are reproduced

through mobility, privileging some while oppressing others Taking a

spatialized sociological approach (Farrugia et al., 2014), we argue that

by shedding insight on the complex intersections between place, gender and ERGM, this research has important implications for creating more equitable gender relations among young people living in rural contexts.

In order to make this argument, we first review the youth studies lit- erature on gender and outmigration, and make the case for taking a spa- tialized approach to the relationship between gender and young people’s ERGMs. Next, we describe the two research projects, the Rural Youth and Recovery project and the Apprenticeship, Youth and Mobility pro- ject, which inform our findings. This description is followed by a brief account of the recent economic and industrial restructuring of the provin- cial economy from a reliance on wild fisheries to increased dependency on oil, gas, and mining industries, as well as the government initiatives supporting this shift such as efforts aimed at recruitment and retention of young women to the sector. We then present the ERGM experiences of the youth in the studies, focusing on how women’s and men’s mobility experiences are structured in relation to each other, which produces dif- ferent orientations to employment in resource extraction. We identify a number of mechanisms that shape gendered mobilities including men’s networks of recruitment into resource extraction-related employment, women’s responsibilities for social reproductive work, and the gender wage ga Next, we describe how men talked about work and the types of work that “suited” them, paying particular attention to how rural places shape an orientation towards certain kinds of (masculine) frontier work and mobilities, work that is differentiated from women’s work. Finally, we conclude with an examination of how, far from displacing place- specific gender relations, in some instances mobility actually served to reproduce gendered identities and inequalities.

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Despite the prevalence of popular representations that construct mobility

as a heroically masculine endeavour (Ni Laoire, 2001), rural young men

are more likely to stay on in their communities, while young women tend

to be more mobile, as they leave for education and better employment

opportunities elsewhere (Corbett, 2007c; Lowe, 2015). This pattern of

gendered mobility is partly attributable to the distinct division of labour

that stubbornly persists in many rural communities in the industrialized

world that have seen widespread restructuring and corporatization of

agricultural, fishing and other primary industries that have historically

sustained rural communities. Broadly speaking, a male-centric culture

has been identified in rural communities (Cloke and Little, 1997; Rye,

2006; Thissen et al., 2010), and this culture coupled with limited and highly gendered employment options in their rural communities (Alston, 2004; Bjarnason and Thorlindsson, 2006) contributes to the outmigra- tion of young women as they search for – though do not necessarily find – more equitable opportunities in regional and urban centres elsewhere.

The resultant pattern of gendered mobility of young people has brought about what Alston and Kent (2009, 92), in speaking of the rural Austral- ian context, refer to as a “masculinized population profile”. These shifts have brought a number of rural scholars to question what happens to rural masculinities when “local men’s worlds of work change” (Kenway et al., 2006, 61) and, along with them, place-specific gender relations are potentially re-organized (Ni Laoire, 2001, 2004).

In coastal fishing communities in Atlantic Canada specifically, rigid gender divisions of labour persist (Lowe, 2015), despite the dramatic restructuring in recent years of what Corbett (2007a, 787) refers to as the

“patriarchal fishery.” Although the young women in Corbett’s study are more highly educated than their male counterparts, the local employment structure advantages young men, who earn higher incomes with less edu- cation in the dominant local industry, the fishery. Those women who do stay in—or return to—their rural communities tend to experience poorer employment outcomes, taking up mainly part-time and precarious em- ployment in the growing service sector. These jobs are regarded as an opportunity to do gender appropriate, stop-gap work for young women who later decide to leave rural communities to pursue education or to stay by marrying a man (Corbett, 2007b).

Describing the context in rural Ireland, Ni Laoire (2001) suggests that rural restructuring represents a threat to certain forms of rural mas- culinity, namely hegemonic farming masculinities. Many rural Irish men have invested in traditional masculine scripts of self-reliance by stay- ing on and working on family farms, even though it may no longer be economically prudent for them to do so as they lose out to larger com- mercial farms (Ni Laoire, 2004). They do so in part because of their advantaged position in the local agricultural economy, as well as out of a sense of duty to protect a valued and traditional way of life. This experience, however, sits in contrast to the popular hero narrative of the male migrant who is progressive, pursuing a career and experiencing modern, urban life. The implication is a cultural devaluation of staying

“behind” in the agricultural way of life, now considered not only trad-

itional but also backward (2001, 225; see also Farrugia, 2015). Within

this context, Ni Laoire explains that many men “struggle to maintain

identity (and control) in changing rural society” and she speculates that

these changing worlds of work, and the erosion of the masculine identi-

ties they once supported, may be contributing to the high rates of suicide amongst rural Irish men (2001, 233). Despite their lack of commercial success and the changing economic basis of Irish society, these men re- ject mobile and entrepreneurial scripts of masculine self-improvement (Kenway et al., 2006). Instead, the farmers recuperate their status both within the community and at home by emphasizing their “relationship with land” as opposed to the “managerial aspects” of successful farm- ing, thereby drawing upon “dominant notions of farming masculinity as tough men’s work” (Ni Laoire, 2004, 294). Similarly, youth studies have found that in rural contexts where there are limited opportunities in his- torically male-dominated occupations, boys and young men turn to out- door leisure practices as a means of expressing traditional masculinities (see Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2009; Norman, Power & Dupre, 2011).

Defining rural masculinity as one’s “relationship with land” or through the symbolism of wilderness is widely noted (see Brandth, 2016;

Campbell et al., 2006; Pini & Mayes, 2014), where rural boys and men display their acumen through physically fit bodies able to endure, if not conquer, the challenges of nature (Little, 2002) both in work and in lei- sure-based activities (Brandth, 2016; Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2009;

Norman et al., 2011; Rye, 2006). Indeed, nature-based leisure practices serve as important cultural sites where place-specific masculine iden- tities can be performed and confirmed through intergenerational men- toring in local knowledges about place, which are especially significant given the diminished opportunities for such exchanges in traditional pri- mary industries, such as fishing and logging (Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2009). The notion of masculinity as reproduced through, and rooted in, a “topographical intimacy” (Lippard, 1997 cited in Kenway et al., 2006, 98) with place-specific geographies highlights that although construc- tions of masculinity specifically, and gendered identities more broadly, are increasingly homogenized and globalized, they are nonetheless “also produced and reproduced in local contexts” (Ni Laoire, 2011, 315).

Connell’s (1993) notion of “frontier masculinity” captures this rela-

tionship between place and gender. The term describes a form of mas-

culinity rooted in mythological constructions of the frontier, embodied

in cultural icons such as the ‘cowboy’ and real and imaginary heroes

such as Daniel Boone, Paul Bunyan (Anahita & Mix, 2006), as well

as constructions more specific to the Canadian context, including Joe

Mufferaw (or Montferrand) and the couriers de bois. The frontiersman

is the epitome of the “manly man,” a phrase we borrow from one of our

young focus group participants, characterized by romanticized ideals of

being physically powerful, courageous, fiercely independent and self-

reliant; qualities that are all brought to bear in the aggressive domina-

tion of nature (see Anahita & Mix, 2006). The concept has also been used to describe decidedly masculinized resource extraction industries, particularly oil and mining, in both the Canadian (see Miller, 2004) and Australian contexts (see Carrington, McIntosh and Scott, 2010; Pini &

Mayes, 2014). For instance, based on their examination of media rep- resentations of the ‘Diggers and Dealers,’ an annual resource extraction conference that takes place in the rural Australian mining community of Kalgoorlie, Pini and Mayes (2014) situate rurality, similar to mas- culinity itself, as a verb that is performatively embodied. They point to the mostly urban executives in attendance who enact a “voracious and unbridled rural masculine heterosexuality of the frontier man” ( 432), which is most often performed through the solicitation of sex workers.

Interestingly, many authors that use the concept seem to forget the other factor that Connell includes in constructions of frontier masculinity, namely that it is also an imperial masculinity that facilitates historical and ongoing processes of settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands. In this regard, mythological constructions of frontier masculinity have served—and continue to serve—broader intersecting symbolic and material logics of globalized capitalism and heteropatriarchy as well as settler colonialism and white supremacy (see Moreton-Robinson, 2016).

Although the examples above speak more to the experiences of adult masculinities, scholars have noted that constructions of rugged, closer- to-nature ideals of frontier masculinity have also informed constructions of the proper development of boys and young men. In particular, the ideal of frontier masculinity can be found behind initiatives such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA residential camps, which were designed to (re) masculinize boys and young men who were supposedly ‘feminized’ by urban lifestyles by introducing them to remote and wilderness contexts (see Lesko, 2001).

We contribute to the youth studies scholarship on gender and mobil- ities by considering the case of young Newfoundlanders’ geographical mobilities in relation to male-dominated resource extraction industries.

Our choice to focus on resource extraction is grounded in a shift in the

province’s economy and its large mobile workforce that travels inter-

provincially, especially to Alberta’s oil/tar sands, for employment in

the sector (Simms and Greenwood, 2015). This case differs somewhat

from the rural youth literature on migration described above in that it is

men, not women, who are more directly engaged in mobilities related

to resource extraction, particularly as skilled trades workers and ‘un-

skilled’ labourers. Research shows that women’s underrepresentation

in skilled trades is linked to the tension between the gendered double

standard related to child and domestic work, and the expectation of

long hours (Wright 2017) and long commutes (Barber, 2016). Further, men’s mobility in resource extraction is enabled by the unpaid care work women do back home (Pini & Mayes, 2012). Unlike the rural to urban flow described in much of the rural youth literature, the young men’s and women’s mobilities we focus on are largely to and from rural and/

or remote regions both intra- and inter-provincially. Resource extraction tends to be situated in rural and remote locales requiring flows of labour from other places, and the related mobility practices are configured by global capitalist logics. This configuration requires us to consider how and why places are connected, how this configuration is produced by and produces the “power geometry” (Massey 1998) of uneven development and inequalities related to global and regional movements of people.

To do this, we respond to Farrugia and colleague’s call (2014) for a spatialized sociology of rural youth studies. According to Farrugia and colleagues (2014), such a project involves a nuanced spatial analysis that problematizes the neat and tidy categories that too often charac- terize rural youth mobility studies. Specifically, they point to reductive constructions that make foregone conclusions about youth as “metro- centric” and “placeless,” which not only provide little insight into the messiness and fluidity of young people’s lived mobilities, but also ul- timately serve to reproduce equally reductive dichotomies between the

“rural” and “urban”. As an alternative, they draw on the work of Henri Lefebvre, advocating for the simultaneous examination of the broader conditions of possibility that structure inequalities, as well as the every- day place-based relationships that are formative of young people’s iden- tities and mobility biographies (Farrugia et al., 2014, 296). Elsewhere, Farrugia (2015) suggests that a sensitivity to the complex spatialities of rural youth mobilities involves simultaneously considering the struc- tural, symbolic and non-representational or affective dimensions that shape youth mobility biographies. The structural dimensions are likely the most common consideration in the rural youth mobilities literature, where regional social and economic inequalities (particularly, rural- urban inequalities) are identified as a primary driver for youth out-mi- gration (see Alston & Kent, 2009; Lowe, 2015; Rao, 2010). Regional disparities, however, must always be understood in relation to broader

“power geometries,” which include processes of restructuring brought

about by neoliberal policies, globalization and environmental degrada-

tion (Power et al., 2014a). Moreover, linear analyses of youth migra-

tion (e.g., migration from ‘disadvantaged’ rural to ‘advantaged’ urban

settings for work or education) do not capture the complexity of youth

mobilities. Rather, young people engage in a multiplicity of mobilities

between spaces acquiring, as they move, “social resources distributed

across different spaces in order to construct biographies stretched across taken for granted rural/urban dichotomies” (Farrugia, 2015, 5). More- over, we would add to Farrugia’s analysis that social resources are also acquired through mobilities between diverse rural spaces (e.g., more or less industrialized ruralities, such as the oil industries in northern Alberta and rural Newfoundland fishing communities). The second dimension is also relatively well established in the literature, where places are sym- bolically coded or discursively constructed as, for example, lively, full of opportunity and progressive, in the case of urban spaces, while rural spaces are often constructed as empty, boring and old fashioned—albeit safe and peaceful (see Farrugia, 2015; Kenway et al., 2006; Norman et al., 2015). The symbolic dimensions have been identified as critical fac- tors in how youth come to understand and experience their rural com- munities, thus shaping their mobility biographies (Ni Laoire, 2000). For the third dimension, Farrugia (2015) turns to non-representational theor- ies to examine the embodied, sensuous connection between self, place and mobility. Here, research examines how place incites feelings of, for example, comfort and belonging or discomfort and disorientation, and how these affective, more-than-rational factors influence mobility de- cisions (see Farrugia, Smyth & Harrison, 2015; Norman et al., 2015;

Power et al., 2014b). Indeed, when taken together, these three dimen- sions enable a supple and complex analysis of the mobility biographies of rural youth.

Taking a spatialized sociological approach to our examination of rural youth mobilities, as Farrugia and colleagues encourage, had a num- ber of important implications for our research. First, it allowed us to understand mobility in complex and non-linear ways (e.g., more than a simple out-migration analysis), where mobility practices are embed- ded at the structural, symbolic and affective levels, shaping how young people understand and experience mobility. Moreover, it allowed us to examine how social inequalities are reproduced through mobility, as place-specific gender relations are “stretched out” across diverse places.

With the mobilities related to largely working-class jobs in the resource extraction sector as our point of departure, we show how local gender relations orientate ERGM possibilities and how they produce and get re- produced by gendered structures of work in resource extraction. Ahmed’s (2006) concept “orientation” is useful here, pointing to how bodies start from particular places, making some directions more possible and feel- ing more familiar than others. In this sense, the spatialized dimensions of economic development in resource extraction have “stretched out”

(Farrugia et al. 2014) gender inequalities across space.

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Our findings emerge from two SSHRC-funded research projects, the Rural Youth and Recovery project, a subcomponent of the Community- University Research for Recovery Alliance (CURRA) and the Youth, Apprenticeship and Mobility project, a subcomponent of the On the Move Partnershi Among other things, both research projects are con- cerned with understanding the nature and impacts of employment and mobility among young people. Together, the research projects span over a decade and document a period of heavy investment by the provincial government into resource extraction, including initiatives aimed at en- couraging youth and underrepresented groups (e.g., women, Indigenous peoples) to enter the skilled trades. We draw on a subset of focus group and interview data with young people ages 16 to 29. This age range cap- tures young people who are the usual targets for training and employ- ment initiatives. For example, the Canadian government’s youth em- ployment programs tend to define youth as ages 15 to 30 (e.g., Canada Summer Jobs Program, Science and Technology Internship Program) (Government of Canada, 2018, 2019). Implicitly, defined in this way, the category ‘youth’ operates to mark and perhaps enact a marginalized rela- tion to the labour market. Pseudonyms are used to protect the anonymity of participants.

The Rural Youth and Recovery project (2007-2014) examined young people’s connections to their home communities, their migration inten- tions and experiences, and their employment and recreation opportunities in rural communities in order to think about possibilities for reimagining life and work in fisheries communities on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland. For a total of four months between April 2009 and June 2010, Norman lived on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, work- ing with community partners, including the Community Youth Network and the Western District School Board of Newfoundland, to recruit par- ticipants into the study. Methods included participant observation, focus groups, photovoice

, and one-on-one interviews with youth and key in- formants that worked with youth. We also conducted a province-wide online survey. For this paper, we draw data from the 12 focus groups with 63 youth ages 16-24 (N=28 male, N=35 female).

The Apprenticeship, Youth and Mobility project (2012 -2020) is part

of the On the Move Partnership that is investigating the impact of ERGM

1. For our photovoice project, youth took photos of places, objects, activities

and people that were significant to them and were invited to participate in

small focus groups to discuss the photos they took (Power, Norman and Du-

pre, 2014b).

on workplaces, employers, workers and their families, and communities in Canada. The project aims to understand the configuration of the edu- cational- and employment-related geographical mobilities of youth and new entrants, focusing on three cases: skilled trades apprentices, rural youth and university students. Methods included key informant inter- views, and work history interviews and focus groups with youth, ap- prentices and skilled trades workers. Participants were recruited with as- sistance from community partners including the Community Youth Net- work, Women’s Resource Development Corporation, and the Newfound- land and Labrador Provincial Apprenticeship and Certification Board, and stakeholders including the training colleges Academy Canada and the College of the North Atlantic. This paper draws on a subset of the 13 focus groups (N=89, 8 women and 79 men, 2 gender not reported) with students enrolled in apprenticeship programs. These focus groups took place on college campuses and while recruitment focused on apprentice- ship status, not age, our analysis here focuses on those between the ages 18 and 29. Of the 89 participants, 64 were between the ages 18 and 29, 23 were ages 30 or older, and 2 did not indicate an age. We also draw on a subset of in-depth work history interviews (N=9) with three apprentice skilled trades workers (ages 23 to 29, 1 woman, and 2 men).

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While not a new phenomenon, rural youth intra- and inter-provincial ERGM in the last 20 years or so must be understood in the context of massive downsizing in the fishing industry, the development of large industrial resource extractive projects in rural and remote regions of the province, and the emergence of a highly trained and mobile labour force (Simms and Greenwood, 2015). There has been a net loss of young people in the province due to outmigration and declining birth rates (Canadian Policy Research Networks 2009), and research predicts that these trends will continue, disproportionately affecting rural regions of the province (Simms and Greenwood, 2015; Simms and Ward, 2017).

In the post-moratorium period, provincial and federal governments and

industry initiatives have focused on reducing capacity and the workforce

in fish harvesting and processing sectors, with virtually no support for

succession planning or recruitment of youth into fisheries (Neis et al.,

2013; Power et al., 2014a). At the same time, the province has invested

heavily in large scale resource-extraction projects, encouraging young

people to enter skilled trades training by introducing initiatives such as

wage subsidies and financial support for training, in order to meet the de- mand for jobs in the sector and discourage outmigration from the prov- ince (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2009; 2015a, 2015b, 2015c; Skills Task Force, 2008). The province and industry have also developed diversity strategies to attract non-traditional workers, includ- ing women, to skilled trades training and to encourage employers to hire women apprentices and skilled trades workers (see, for example, Gov- ernment of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2007).

The degree to which these investments have been successful is de- batable. While the number of women in skilled trades training has in- creased, the percentage of women in the workforce remains low. For example, the Diversity Network reports that the percentage of women in building trades unions has increased from 4.14% in 2013 to 5.49% in 2015 (Porter, n.d.). It also appears that employers prefer to hire journey- persons over less experienced, new entrants to skilled trades, and yet ap- prentices must log hours working in a supervised employment arrange- ment to complete their certification (Power, 2017). Most skilled trades training is delivered using an apprenticeship model, requiring in-class course work followed by supervised employment. Advancement in the trades requires additional blocks of in-class training, followed by on-the- job mentorshi The province has removed restrictions on and barriers to the inter-provincial mobility of apprentices, facilitating temporary em- ployment outside the province (e.g., Fort McMurray’s oil/tar sands) so that apprentices can more easy meet the on-the-job requirements (De- partment of Advanced Education and Skills, 2016; Government of New- foundland and Labrador, 2015c). Given the rural and remote locations of most resource extraction work both in the province and elsewhere, employment in this sector is often characterized by a range of mobile employment arrangements that require long hours and long commutes or spending extended time away from home.

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Young women’s and men’s ERGMs must be understood as relational

practices that reflect and reproduce local gender regimes. In some rural

communities, there are long standing ‘traditions’ of men going away

for work, including but not limited to, work in resource extraction. For

instance, in a small rural community on the south west coast of New-

foundland that once relied primarily on the fishery, men now move to

Alberta for part of the year to lay seismic cable. Young men in our study

reported being recruited into this particular ERGM by other men in their

community. Like the young men, women have few opportunities for lo- cal employment but they described their orientation to mobile work in ways that differ from men’s orientations. Young women in this com- munity invest in educational mobility instead. As Brittany explained,

“mostly girls go to university, boys go to seismic [oil fields],” with the men coming back with lots of money and “a new car,” while the women come back with no money and lots of “student loans” (Focus Group, age 18). In this community, and others we visited, rigid gender divisions of labour are normative, with consequences for how young women and men could take up and think about their biographical mobilities. As Tina said, “Well, ah, girls are not capable of doing seismic [oil fields], it’s true […] I wouldn’t be able to put eighty pounds of cable on my neck and walk for that long” (Focus Group, age 19). The seismic work referred to here is labour intensive manual work that requires carrying heavy cable across long distances as part of the seismic testing before drilling for oil; work that for this participant precludes women’s participation. Ideas about gender, bodies and work, in this case about men’s and women’s abilities to do manual labour, clear the way, provide an orientation for men to work in resource extraction away, and for young women to leave their home community for education, making certain kinds of gendered mobilities normative.

For young women and men apprentices in the skilled trades, perhaps like other industries, getting a job in the province or away depends large- ly on “who you know.” These social connections are gendered. Com- pared to women participants, young men in apprenticeships described getting hired in workplaces locally and out of the province where they al- ready knew other workers from having worked with them on other jobs, or from familial or social networks (see also Earle and Power, 2017).

As an apprentice named John put it: “I worked there previously as a labourer, back in 2006. That’s the year that I done the trade for welding.

So basically I knew a lot of people down there and I had a name as a

good worker or whatever, and I got hired” (Interview, age 29). The point

here is not only that men are able to activate existing networks of men in

the trades or as in the previous example, in one’s community to access

employment, but that these networks provide a way to recognize “a good

worker.” In the next section, we pick up the discussion about how local

gender relations provide an orientation towards preferring and valuing

certain kinds of mobilities and work, but for now, we point to how defin-

itions of a good worker tell us something about one’s ability to do a job,

as well as something about what is valued about the work. If one of the

things that is valued is the masculine character of the work, then being a

man accords a kind of recognition not available to women apprentices.

Men’s and women’s ERGMs are mediated by the heteronormative family-work nexus. By this we mean the way in which the gendered world of paid work is supported by and reinforces gendered care work and dependency. On the one hand, child care and family responsibilities have different implications for women’s and men’s employment and mo- bility options, with women’s care and domestic work freeing men for mobile employment (Hayfield, 2018; Pini & Mayes, 2012). John, an ap- prentice introduced earlier, told us that while he prefers not to travel out- side the province for work because he has a young family, he wouldn’t mind long-distance commuting for work on the island:

John: With regards to leaving now, it’s a different story now, because I’ve got a family, right?

Interviewer: Right, I was going to ask. You have a young baby now. So are your options a bit different?

John: That’s right. I wouldn’t want to leave now, right? When there’s work here on the island, you know…

Interviewer: Would you be willing to work, say, outside [name of home community] but still within the province?

John: Oh yes. If I got a job at [name of rural industrial site], I’d be about 200 kilometers away from home. You know, at least you’re on the island, you know.

For John, family responsibilities do not close mobility options, even if he personally desires to work closer to home. It’s worth noting here that John’s preference for work closer to home still relies on his ability to be mobile and away from home for extended periods of time, and this requires the labour of somebody else to do the care and domestic work required in the reproduction of families (see Barber, 2016 for an argu- ment about the difficulty men experience in terms of opting out of mo- bile work).

On the other hand, the structure of employment in industrial resource extraction – characterized by temporary work, long hours, shift and ro- tational work, long commutes, and fly-in/fly-out operations – impedes women’s ability to combine employment and child care responsibilities.

In the excerpt below, a young new mother – an apprentice crane operator

partnered with a male tradesperson – describes her inability to get back

to work because she is not “ready and willing and able to jump up and

go” due to child care responsibilities.

Rosie: Well, this is my problem now. I don’t see myself getting back to work anytime soon because childcare is tremendous. My boyfriend is a journeyperson crane operator. He earns much, much more money than I do. I live in [name of town], so I mean I can’t get a job anywhere around here as crane operator, because it’s just unavailable. But childcare, oh my gracious. I don’t know how people do it.

Interviewer: So in your line of work, mobility is part of the job. You have to go where the jobs are.

Rosie: Yes, you have to go. You have to be ready and willing and able to jump up and go. You can’t stay home and work; it’s not going to happen.

… I don’t have any family who are here or anyone willing to look after my kid for me to go to work. … (Interview, age 29)

Rosie identifies her responsibility for child care as an impediment to her ERGM. However, that she is responsible for child care needs some unpacking. The expectation that she is primarily responsible for child care is reinforced by the gender wage gap (“he earns much, much more money”) — he is a certified journeyperson, and she is an apprentice, so presumably it makes financial sense that he is the one freed for mobil- ity by her child care work. (Though, an alternative and also financial- ly sound approach would prioritize her employment so that she could advance in her apprenticeship and earn higher wages, more quickly.) While she points to the built-in labour mobility of the industry, and the lack of local employment for crane operators in her area (“I can’t get a job anywhere around here”), it is not clear that even if there were local employment opportunities, she could avail of them. Rosie has few sup- ports in her rural community to help make her employment possible;

she does not live near family and there is no formal daycare (“I don’t

have any family who are here or anyone willing to look after my kid

for me to go to work”). She is responsible for child care, because there

is no one else. Rosie and her male partner hold different structural pos-

itions in relation to familial work that enable his mobility and constrain

hers. Furthermore, Rosie’s articulation is a very different positioning in

relation to family and mobile work from John’s. Juxtaposing these two

excerpts makes visible the gender work that enables ERGM for some

(i.e., men) and the way flexible, mobile labour is part of the “organ-

izational logic” of the industry (Stokes, 2017; Williams et al., 2012; see

also Acker, 1990). Child care responsibilities and a lack of available and

reliable child care in rural places restrict women’s ability to engage in

certain kinds of ERGMs -- those that require travelling long distances

and spending extended periods of time away from home. The juxtaposed

excerpts also illustrate how the structure of apprentices’ employment in

resource extraction relies on labour mobility of a certain kind, one that relies on gender conventions of paid and unpaid work in rural environ- ments that make rural and remote work familiar to men (a point we re- turn to below) and that assumes familial care and domestic work will get done by someone other than the mobile worker.

Just as women’s immobilities are often defined in relation to the mo- bilities of the men in their lives, so too are certain kinds of mobilities.

Young women whose partners work in resource extraction often follow their husbands and boyfriends to faraway places. Below, we share Dar- ius’ account of following her boyfriend out west for work and finding her dream job, only to have to move back home to the southwest coast of Newfoundland when he is laid off.

Darius: …I moved to Fort McMurray, Alberta. I was there for a year and a half, boyfriend got laid off, we had to come home and we’re out of a job, both of us [laughs].

Interviewer: So you were working out there as well?

Darius: Yeah, I was doing early childhood education. I was working in the YMCA daycare there, but he got laid off and we couldn’t stay there just on my income. Just could not do it, we were paying a lot of money for rent and stuff, so (Focus Group, age 22, 2009).

Here, Darius describes the ‘boom and bust’ cycles that are common in the oil extraction industry in Alberta. Her account tells us something about how gendered heteronormative expectations in her home com- munity shape mobility biographies, as Darius follows her boyfriend to Fort McMurray and later back home. It also tells us something about how gendered divisions of labour and the wage gap in the host commun- ity serve to make women’s mobility dependent on men’s. In the case of Fort McMurray, the oil extraction industry supplies most of the highest paying jobs, while the wages paid to jobs in other, more feminized sec- tors such as education and the service sector are much lower (see Dorow, 2015). This gap makes living in places like Fort McMurray -- where the cost of living is high -- difficult without a ‘male wage’.

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In the previous section we focused on the relationship between young

women’s and men’s ERGMs, in particular the ways in which mo-

bile work in the extraction sector is made more possible for men than

women, arguing that place-specific gender relations shape the mobility

experiences of young people at the same time that they are reproduced through mobility. In this section, we focus on the masculine homosocial character of mobile work in resource extraction, and consider how in the context of changing local employment opportunities, mobile work serves to entrench local gender relations as they are stretched out and performed in other places.

Elsewhere, it has been suggested that within rural contexts gender relations are spatially coded, where the “‘great outdoors’ is valorized as a masculine space,” while “life indoors is feminized” (Kenway &

Hickey-Moody, 2009, 847; see also Norman et al., 2011). In the context of employment in rural Newfoundland, this spatial coding translates into young men valuing working with “my hands” in the outdoors. As Jason put it: “Anything that works with my hands—switching tasks outside. I tend not to like to do the same thing over and over again. So, I would like to be out there everyday with something different to do” (emphasis added, Focus Group, age 18). Young men’s preferences for working out- side with their hands do not just emerge from nowhere; instead they are embedded in repetitive practice over the course of one’s life. As Tony described it: “My ideal job is spending most of my time outdoors. Ever since I grew up that’s it and that’s part of my life was always outdoors”

(Focus Group, age 19). These spatial mappings are rooted in generations of men working both the land (e.g., cutting firewood, hunting and, in some regions, logging and mining) and, of course, the sea in terms of fishing and sealing. In this way, traditional conventions of masculinity are confirmed through historically embedded linkages between gender performances in space and place (Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2009).

These conventions of ‘manly work’ are, as can be expected, largely

understood in contrast to feminine or ‘women’s work’, which the men

characterize as working indoors, often in offices or retail settings, serv-

ing customers or working with the public. In the CURRA focus groups in

particular, young women and men alike drew attention to the stark div-

ision of labour that exists in the service industries in their communities,

where women serve, while men are served. Indeed, service work in rural

contexts represents a contested site where the changing perspectives on

the place-specific gender order of rural Newfoundland are foregrounded

and challenged. Many of the youth see service industry work—particu-

larly food service—as reflective of the “old fashioned” ways of their

rural communities. However, as this exchange among a group of young

men shows, there is a tension between contesting stark gender divisions

of labour as sexist and accepting, even endorsing the prevailing gender

order:

Eoin: One feller was sixteen, he went up there and tried to put in a resume, he wanted to be out front to serve the coffee n’ that. They wouldn’t take him [Laughs] (age 19).

Mitchell: Jesus, you see half them that works there looks like men [Laugh- ter] (age 18).

Interviewer: So what do you think about that, um, that Tim Horton’s

wouldn’t hire a man?

Eoin: Doesn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t work there.

Kevin: I think it’s discrimination (age 23) Mitchell: Yeah.

Neil: Sexist bastards [Laughter] (age 18) […]

Interviewer: What were you thinking Eoin?

Eoin: I really wouldn’t work there either, so I really don’t care.

Mitchell: I wouldn’t wanna work there either. I’d do the renovations, but not servin’ coffee […]

Kevin: Punching holes in the donuts [Laughter]

Mitchell: That’s a job for ye!

Interviewer: Kevin, you said it’s discrimination, what did you mean by that?

Kevin: Well, if they don’t hire no men, all women, men and women could both take the coffee pot to pour out the coffee (Focus Group, 2009).

Service work is thus a site where place-specific conventions of gender

and sexuality are reproduced, policed, and contested, as clearly illus-

trated in the above narrative. For our purposes here, we want to draw

attention to both the deeply entrenched gender conventions that struc-

ture the place-specific workscapes of rural Newfoundland, but also the

emergent conventions that are pushing back against this specific gender

order. Rural scholars have pointed out that gender relations are changing

in rural communities, which has implications for traditional masculine

identities (Brandth, 2016; Li Naoire, 2001). As women migrate from

2. Tim Horton’s

is a popular fast food and coffee franchise.

their rural communities in search of education and better work oppor- tunities in larger regional or more urban centres, traditional conventions of place-based gender order, and more specifically the place of working- class masculinities within it, are argued to be under threat (Ni Laoire, 2001). However, our argument here is slightly different as we suggest that rather than operating to disembed the traditional gender order of rural Newfoundland, ERGM related to resource extraction actually works to stabilize and re-embed the gender order.

For many of the young men we talked to, mobility is positioned as an opportunity to move to other rural contexts where they can secure good, high paying jobs working outdoors with their hands:

Craig: I like the [oil] rig because it was really suited for me. You know, it was pretty rough. Everybody’s jus’ kinda, you know, you’re out, you’re doin’ your own thing, you got your own responsibilities. If it doesn’t work, beat it with a sledge hammer long enough [laughter] (age 20).

Interviewer: Okay, so I’m picturing a physical job and you liked using your body…

Craig: Yea, definitely. I like buildin’ stuff, fixin’ stuff.

Jackie: He’s a manly man! [laughter] (age 19) Craig: Nah, it’s just what I do (Focus Group, 2009)

Tellingly, this description of the type of work done on the oil rigs in northern Alberta contains many of the characteristics the young men in rural Newfoundland covet in work, such as “rough” physical work in outdoor contexts that involves self-responsibility and independence (i.e.,

“you’re doin’ your own thing”). In response to this description, a female member of the focus group playfully mocks him as a “manly man”. Far from being a benign gesture of playfulness, we point to this as an indi- cation of how traditional notions of working-class masculinity are con- trasted against, and must compete with, emergent constructions of soft- er, supposedly less manly performances of masculinity that, while not definitively outlined in the above narrative, nonetheless are implied in such mockery. For us this exchange is particularly rich because it high- lights the degree to which place-specific rural Newfoundland masculin- ities are not exclusively performed in place, largely because there are

“no good jobs” left in rural Newfoundland, but that their performances are “stretched out” (Farrugia, 2014) across space as young men search for work in other contexts, such as the oil fields in northern Alberta.

At the same time, place-based performances of working-class masculin-

ity rooted in the historical, cultural and geographical contexts of coastal Newfoundland must compete with other and, as in the narrative above, ill-defined, conceptions of masculinity. In an examination of rural mas- culinities, Brandth (2016) notes shifts in the fathering practices of rural men, ushering in diverse masculinities that in their diversity may well undermine traditional versions of hegemonic masculinity (see Anderson, 2009). Research also shows how men’s ERGM can open space for new forms of non-hegemonic involved fathering (Aure, 2018) or respatialize masculine forms of household care that reinscribe gender divisions of labour (Dorow & Mandizadza, 2018). The point here is that while rural masculinity is multiple and shifting, the narrative above shows how trad- itional versions persist as local gender relations are stretched out across places.

We heard from young men that in addition to the physicality of the work, geographical remoteness and male environments make work- places inhospitable environments for women.

Craig: On a rig, I wouldn’t have liked working with women. (age 20) Jackie: And why is that Craig? (age 19)

Craig: It’s just ‘cause you’re gone all the time, right, and everybody’s in a camp and it’s hard to have a relationship, you know. If you’re leavin’ your girlfriend for two weeks and staying at a camp with some other girl, right […] ‘Cause I know what we’re like, we’re all pigs […] They call us “rig pigs” (Focus Group).

And, Craig continues a little bit later on:

Craig: …I mean, I was nine hours away from home pretty well every time I went to work. We would be two, three hours off the highway, right in the bush. There’s no cell phone service, no nothin’, you’re just in there, and you can’t get out. Roads get all closed when you go in, there’s no service, there’s no internet, there’s no nothin’ […] But, you’re in some sort of community, though, so there’s always something you could go and do.

We weren’t even allowed to walk off the site because there’s bears every- where. You’re just stuck in a camp with, you know, [a bunch of men].

In these descriptions, a particular version of masculinity is articulated;

namely a rugged, “frontier masculinity” that is performatively con-

structed in remote, harsh geographical climates and sexist (“we’re all

rig pigs”) (homo)social spaces. It is assumed that the presence of women

would disrupt the communal homosocial bonds that exist between men

in these contexts. Equally important here is the assumption that men’s

violent sexuality cannot be controlled in these environments, which in

turn, acts as a rationale to exclude women from this line of work. Al- though the stories of this type of frontier masculinity are told in relation to geographically distant places, we would nonetheless suggest that their telling is culturally meaningful within the context of southwest New- foundland, that also has a historical legacy of a deeply gendered division of labour, making far away homosocial spaces feel familiar, if not like home.

Indeed, the parallels between the two contexts are obvious — dangerous frontier work, whether in the bush or on the ocean, in all male contexts, and in geographically remote locations. We hasten to add, how- ever, that this is not the only version of masculinity that was performed in the focus groups. Indeed, a range of masculinities were performa- tively narrated, but the above narrative is significant we argue, because it draws attention to how mobility is more complex than a simple process of displacing and disembedding, and we suggest that mobility may also be used as a resource to stabilize and re-embed masculine identities and gender relations that are otherwise ‘under threat’ in contexts of rural re- structuring and “no work” in coastal Newfoundland.

C

We have argued that outward mobility from rural places does not equal

upward mobility in any simple way, and in fact in the case of resource ex-

traction, actually serves to entrench—rather than dis-embed—the place-

specific gender relations of rural Newfoundland. Drawing on qualitative

focus group data from two separate research projects, we have shown

how gender relations in rural Newfoundland communities produce orien-

tations to employment and mobility in the context of industrial resource

extraction. Ideas and practices related to gender and sexuality, bodies,

and paid and unpaid work clear the way for men to work away from

home in resource extraction, in turn making certain kinds of gendered

mobilities normative. Such orientations produce a kind of familiarity

for men in remote workplaces that are male-dominated, and doing work

that requires independence, self-responsibility, and physicality. In other

words, the spatial coding of gender relations in rural places that we have

described inform and make intelligible the articulation and rendering of

possible mobilities – a spatial coding rooted in the historical, cultural and

geographical contexts of coastal Newfoundland. Another way of saying

this is that gender relations of rural places are “stretched out” (Farrugia,

3. To say that young men experience homosocial spaces as familiar is not meant

to negate other possible experiences of exclusion, including encountering

stereotypical attitudes about Newfoundlanders.

2014) across space as young men and women engage in different types of mobilities related to work in trades and resource extraction industries, and are reproduced rather than disrupted in these distant places.

At the same time, the “organizational logic” (Stokes, 2017; Williams et al., 2012; see also Acker, 1990) of industrial resource extraction that relies on a mobile workforce is supported by the local gender order that frees male workers from care and domestic work for mobile work and reproduces men well “suited” for frontier work. The local gender order also renders invisible this organisational logic, as ERGMs are reduced to individual preferences, rational financial decisions, and gendered abil- ities. The mobility requirement of much of the employment associated with resource extraction in the province and elsewhere serves to limit access to women and preserves the male-dominated character of trades and resource extraction workplaces.

Despite diversity policies and initiatives aimed at supporting women to enter relevant skilled trades training programs, as elsewhere, the sector continues to be male-dominated. While an examination of the effective- ness of such policies is beyond the scope of this paper, our findings offer insights regarding the complexity of power relations that produce rural Newfoundland places, both structuring young people’s relationships to work and mobility and, in so doing, producing place-based (although not place-bound) gender meanings and identities. Rather than address- ing such complexities, diversity policies that target the recruitment and retention of women into resource extraction industries as the ‘solution’

to broader structural conditions of possibility end up positioning women

as the ‘problem’ and as in need of ‘fixing’. The consequences for women

who work in these industries may be severe, including being perceived

as not belonging, and worse, being the targets of sexual harassment and

assault, and while not discussed here, these are common experiences

reported in interviews with women apprentices. Also severe are the con-

sequences for communities dependent on resource extraction industries

that rely on and reproduce local gender inequalities. A spatialized ap-

proach to young people’s ERGMs helps to make visible some aspects of

this “power geometry.” We suggest that fair and equitable gender rela-

tions, and perhaps relations in general, in and across local communities

are tied to broader changes related to the intersecting material and sym-

bolic logics of globalized capitalism.

r

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a

The On the Move Partnership is a project of the SafetyNet Centre for Occupa- tional Health & Safety Research at Memorial University. It is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council through its Partnership Grants funding opportunity (Appl ID 895-2011-1019), Innovate NL, CFI and multiple universities and community partners. The authors wish to acknowledge Made- line Bury, Gary Catano, Sylvia Grills, Jenna Hawkins, Julia Lawler and Michelle Porter who contributed research assistance to the Apprenticeship, Youth and Mo- bility Project.

The Community-University Research for Recovery Alliance (CURRA) in- itiative is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through its Community-University Research Alliance (CURA) program (grant number 833-2007-1027), by the Newfoundland and Labrador Research Development Corporation, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and additional financial and in-kind support from numerous community partners and groups (www. curra.ca).

Nicole Power, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dr. Power’s recent work has focused on work, mobilities and sense of place among young people in rural and remote coastal communities.

Email: [email protected]

Moss Norman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology at the Uni- versity of British Columbia. He uses a qualitative, community-based research design in examining the relationship between physical cultural activities, mascu- linity, embodiment and health.

Email: [email protected]